Just over a month ago, I wrote an article about a new search engine called Presearch. It’s my favoured search engine to use because it rewards me with PRE tokens every time I use it and since I work within SEO and PPC, I use it a lot – most days, I reach the limit of 30 searches that I will be rewarded for. It also offers a very quick way to switch to Google too which is great for when I’m doing keyword research or if I want to see what snippets come up. However, something I never tried on Presearch was advertising.
They have a rather unique advertising model where you stake a certain amount of tokens on each keyword and if you are the highest staker, your ad is shown. The majority of keywords were unstacked so they only required 100 PRE tokens to claim that ad spot (Back when I wrote that article, 100 PRE tokens would cost you £7, today it would cost £5.20). I concluded that £7 for unlimited ad clicks would be a great deal, the only question was how much monthly traffic does each keyword receive? Presearch does not yet offer such information so I decided to find out for myself.
What did I do?
I decided to spend £100 on presearch tokens and stake them on a variety of different keywords to find out what the actually monthly volume was for each one of them. I let the ads run for just over a month, after which I compared the volume of those keywords to the same keywords on good old Google. Here were my results:
| Staked PRE | Ad Position | Views | Ad Clicks | Monthly volume on Presearch | Monthly volume on Google | |
| 1 | 300 | 1 | 10 | 1 | 10 | 165,000 |
| 2 | 100 | 1 | 15 | 0 | 15 | 33,100 |
| 3 | 100 | 1 | 6 | 0 | 6 | 18,100 |
| 4 | 100 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 590 |
| 5 | 100 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 49,500 |
| 6 | 100 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 6,600 |
| 7 | 100 | 1 | 5 | 0 | 5 | 74,000 |
Was it worth it?
Absolutely not. As you can see, the search volume on Presarch is tiny compared to that of Google. For example, look at Keyword 1 – on Google, there are a massive 165,000 monthly searches for it, whereas, on Presearch, it’s only 10. It’s quite amazing that I even managed to receive a click on my ad with only 10 views, giving me a clickthrough rate of 10% for that specific keyword. However, I do suspect that it was a competitor who then outbid me. That’s why I had to stake 300 PRE tokens on the term, to regain the first position. A move that I later regretted.
What makes this worse, and it’s something I wasn’t aware of when writing the previous article, is that once you stake your PRE tokens, they are locked for a year. This means that you can’t sell them. Poor old me thought that in the worst-case scenario, I could unstake and sell my tokens for a loss; unfortunately, I have to wait another 11 months and pray that I either luck out and get some clicks or that the crypto market treats PRE nicely so I don’t end up losing the entirety of the £100 invested into this little experiment.
Summary
To summarise, I would say that although I will continue to use Presearch as my default browser to get those free tokens, I won’t be advertising on it (I guess I will be since my tokens are locked up, but after that, I definitely won’t be launching any new ads on it). The monthly volume is far too low to justify the costs of the tokens. For £100, you could get a far better return on Google as you’re paying per click and not just to have your ad shown. While Presearch’s advertising model seems good on the outside, it’s definitely not worth it considering the monthly search volumes. I have learnt my lesson, just focus on Google.
Interested in boosting your SEO/PPC? Check out the following articles:
How do SEO and PPC work together?
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